[Aug 8-14’22] When it rains in the desert

Arctic is warming at 4x speed, wolves and beavers are key to rewilding, oil heirs fund activist groups and fossil fuel industry’s problem with methane emissions.

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Climate 🎉

References: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] and [6].

Hello everybody!

From late next week I’m going on vacation for about one month with the family (my 0yr old’s first vacation 🥳). This means that there will be no newsletters for a little over a month. However, I will pause all paying members subscriptions until I’m back. Next newsletter will probably be September 26 (or maybe the week before that).

See you on the other side! 👋

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‼️News you can’t miss

Here’s one important scary/bad (🙀), good (😻), interesting (😼) and fossil (💩) news item.

🙀 The Arctic is warming 4x faster than the rest of the planet

😻 Wolves and beavers key in rewilding efforts

😼 Oil heirs are funding large climate activist groups.

💩 Fossil fuel industry’s problem with methane in 4 charts

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👩‍⚕️ Status: Climate & Science

Let’s look at how we’re doing this week!

[#arcticwarming] — When some people hear that temperatures will increase by 2C by 2100 they think how the heck is that going to make any difference at all. What they tend to forget is that this is an average and that some regions are warming a lot faster. One of those regions happens to the region with lots of ice and that’s the Arctic which is heating 4x the global average.

[#desertrain] — Rain in the dessert? Why yes indeed. The Death Valley in the US received 75% of annual rainfall on one occasion last week. It’s a so called thousand year rainfall event. The interesting “coincidence” is that four of those thousand year rainfall events happened last week. One interesting way to look at climate change is that for humans the main problem with climate change is to a large extent a problem of water displacement. You don’t want water in the dessert or in people’s basements, but you do want it in the Rhine river - and currently there’s so little of it that it’s causing a lot of problems for shipping.

[#megadroughts] — Here’s an excellent deep dive into how climate change causes megadroughts like the one’s we’re seeing just everywhere these days.

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📰 The 7 Grand Challenges

⚡️Decarbonize Electricity

Clean electricity is the one do-or-die challenge we must solve.

[#methane] — Considering to get a heat pump instead of your gas burner or gas stove? Take a look at this article which looks at the problem with fossil gas in four charts.

🏘 Reduce impact of urban and rural areas

Lowering the impact of urban and rural areas.

[#flyingoffsets] — Here’s just a reminder that carbon offsets will never make flying climate friendly. But there are lot of other things that will which are outlined in this article. From new fuels to direct air capture.